Quality Assurance Is Key

As I mentioned in a previous article. SOA creates all sorts of new challenges for the QA department. Successful SOA implementations require that proper QA best practices, such as load testing of each service, is performed. Performance, security and governance testing should be a part of your overall testing plan to ensure that both the business and technical requirements are met.

ROI Is Difficult to Achieve Initially and Is Realized Over Time

SOA is not a technology; it is an architecture. Like any other architecture, value is earned over time as the architecture expands and matures. Some of these companies were on their second or third SOA project and were realizing substantial ROI. Others were in their first iteration and did not see immediate ROI but instead were laying down the foundation for future SOA projects to maximize their ROI.

Deliver Substantial Business Value

In all cases, these award winning case studies delivered substantial business value. None of these case studies were focused on fixing IT infrastructure or based solely on reducing development costs through reuse. These may have been some side effects, but the value of the IT benefits are minuscule as compared to the business benefits which in some cases were in the billions of dollars over a given time period.

So for all of the pundits out there who claim that you should never talk to the business about SOA or that SOA is an IT initiative not a business initiative—look at the huge ROIs of these projects and the business transformations that occurred and reconsider those stances. I rest my case!

To summarize, make sure that your SOA initiative shares some if not all of the eight characteristics of successful SOA implementations. There has been so much chatter about SOA failures as of late. Now that we have six great examples of SOA successes, we should take the best practices that these companies used and put them to use in our projects so we can get shot at next year's prize.